Note: The version of the game that was provided — and that was used for this review — is the version created for the Nintendo 3DS. Normally that would not be a remarkable issue but due to the alterations of the game — significant alterations that include the complete absence of multi-player play on this platform — it must be clearly understood that game play on the 3DS platform is significantly different from game play on the other platforms.

Considering its roots as the manifestation of a player-focused take upon what is arguably one of the more popular live-action obstacle-course-based game shows on TV today, the slick packaging and prime-time sports overlay in the form of the announcers should not surprise...

Introduction

Wipeout: Create & Crash is the next title in the well-established Wipeout video game series that was developed and published by Activision for the North American games market.

Wipeout Create & Crash includes versions for Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS, and is the fourth direct sequel to previous games in the series that include Wipeout: In the Zone, Wipeout 2, and Wipeout 3 which appeared on a variety of platforms.

Created and published by Activision, Wipeout Create & Crash is based upon the ABC TV series Wipeout, which is itself based upon a wide number of Japanese game shows that elevated the sports-based obstacle course style of game show to new heights throughout the 1990s and 00s.

The original Japanese approach to the obstacle-course game show was to place contestants in situations that tested both their physical fitness and resolve, while also putting attractive usually younger men and women in costumes that tended to show off their bodies in a provocative manner, creating a titillating type of mainstream television entertainment that could get past the censors due to its sports-theme.

The Wipeout games are American versions of the very popular obstacle-course-style of game show from Asia, and should not be confused with the Wipeout game series developed by Liverpool-based developer Psygnosis, a futuristic series of racing games that have no resemblance to the games based on ABC’s game show.

It certainly does not hurt this game (or its series) that it utilizes a rather cute but warm & fuzzy imagery for the contestants, whose appearance instantly reminds the player of the sort of form that Avatars take on the Wii / Wii U and to a lesser extent on Microsoft’s Xbox platforms.

Unlike the format for the original Japanese game shows that served as the inspiration for both the TV show Wipeout and the games that followed, players will not find the very obvious serialization of sexual roles in the games, as that is not their primary or hidden agenda.

Game Play

The name of this title reflects one of its stand-out features, and that is the fact that you can not only play the game that is familiar to its viewers, but you can also create your own levels for the game and then you can share the levels you have created with your friends.

The game features a selection of new courses which sport new theme-based obstacles as well as an all-new cast of characters specifically for the game.

Game play presents a fairly simple approach to what is in reality a very complicated set of challenges. In the game the player essentially follows what is clearly a rail-based route, running, sliding, and jumping through a set of obstacles while avoiding traps and moving objects that potentially have the ability to knock the player out of the arena.

The game play spans 12 episodes that are based on specific themes, like holidays, seasons, eras, or character-based themes.

The role of each contestant tends to closely observe the sort of stereotypes present in the real-world examples of a typical game show contestant, though the use of the often cute avatar image certainly flavors how the contestants are viewed by the players.

Each of the “episodes” sees the player attempting to master four levels of play, with the first and third always being set on a specific course, while the second episode generally consists of a mini-game that follows the theme of the episode.

The fourth episode always takes place within the “Wipeout Zone” which is the zone from which the game gathers its title and basic premise.

In addition to these four well-defined courses there is also a daily bonus course that they player can choose to play — or not.

The final Wipeout Zone is where the producers inflict the most intentional damage — in the form of challenges — on the contestants, as that is where they face the most brutal of the obstacles in order to create a very obvious set of tension for the viewers.

Game play controls are very simple, making game play easy enough for all age-ranges, as the complexity is found not in the controls but rather in the strategy that the player must apply, from timing to a basic grasp of the specific physics that applies to each given challenge.

Using a fixed camera in third-person view, the game environment consists of the player in the foreground with the unfolding course before them.

As the player moves along the course, they use the control sticks to alter direction and to avoid obstacles in their path, while the buttons are used for running, jumping, and sliding.

Considering that game play is largely focused upon the player within the narrow view of the game show environment, it should not come as much of a surprise that following spectacular failures, the player is given the option of watching instant replays that more or less celebrate their failure in as spectacular a fashion as is possible.

In addition to the structured course game play the player has the option of building and playing through their own custom-designed courses, as well as playing a challenge course that consists of increasingly more difficult elements.

Course creation is easy to master, as considerable care was taken in the design of the game to make that process as intuitive as possible largely because the creation — and sharing via 14-digit generating codes — of custom-designed courses is the raison d’être for this offering in the series (obviously this is special to the game since the game show does not include elements like the contestants designing and sharing their own custom courses!).

The only fly in the ointment for this new offering in the Wipeout series has to do with the fact that the 3DS version of the game (the version that we played for this review) does NOT have the solid multi-player mode that the other versions are built with.

The new capacity for permitting gamers to both design their own custom courses and levels and share those custom-designed courses with their mates adds an entirely new and attractive dimension to the game and game series.

Considering that the game is based upon a TV show whose strength in entertainment is the fact that the player is not simply pitted against an obstacle course but is also competing against other contestants, one would think that every effort would be made to include that element in the game.

That multi-player aspect of the game received considerable attention in terms of the version that was created for the other platforms, but despite the fact that Nintendo’s 3DS is ideally suited for that sort of network-based multi-player game play, it was nevertheless not included in the 3DS version.

While graphics are not usually an element that we cover with respect to game play — that being one of the many aspects of a game that is best covered in the My Take section — in the case of Wipeout Create & Crash it is necessary to bring the matter up for some very obvious — one is tempted to qualify it as “painfully obvious” — reasons.

In this case it is necessary because key elements of the game graphics have intrusive elements on game play in general.

Specifically there is an erratic and often visually disturbing effect when the character on screen is subjected to effects that the game appears to be ill-equipped to render.

What invariably ends up happening when these events occur — and they occur often — is that the character manifests movements and gestures that instantly stand out as odd, and that result in a break in whatever immersion level the player has managed to obtain.

This sort of aberration is usually the kiss of death for a video game, particularly since maintaining player immersion is a critical element in game design, but there you have it.

Thankfully the fun (and funny) elements of game in this instance tend to override what might otherwise have been an element of game play that badly damaged the overall score the game received and, despite the fact that they are not as critical with respect to the overall player-view of the game, still warrant our attention here even if just to make the player aware of and expect them…

One of the best elements in game play in Wipeout: Create and Crash is the fact that it centers around testing the player’s agility and mastery of the game controls, as well as their ability to evaluate and solve its various puzzle-like challenges in order to pick the best method for mastering each challenge, which invariably comes down to timing and route.

The world of Wipeout is neatly divided into themes that range from holidays (like Halloween) and eras, as well as locations and -- as is the case here -- characters like this dashing pirate.

Lab Rat’s Take

Our Lab Rat for Wipeout: Create and Crash is a long-time reader and competitor in our game review trivia contest, and says he is a serious fan of the “First-Person-Shooter” genre as well as platformer and puzzle games. A fan of ABC’s Wipeout TV show, he has spent a lot of time playing the Xbox 360 version of the game, and feels that he is ideally suited to review the game for 3DS because of his extensive experience with the 360 version.

“Wipeout Create and Crash is a lot of fun and if you like the TV show you will really like the game a lot and I like the TV show so you can tell that I like the game too!

“Even though the hard parts are covered in foam I wouldn’t want to try to beat the courses in the game if they were the courses in the TV show, but I would like to be on the TV show if I was old enough.

“If you played the game before this one which was Wipeout 2, which was not a really good game because it had lots of bugs and it was really short, you will be very happy with this game because it is longer and it does not have the bugs that made the last game hard to like.

“The best part of the game is being able to make your own courses for the game that you can share with your friends. But if you are going to use the course creator it is really very important to do as well as you can on regular game play because you have to get lots of money so that you can use the money that you get to unlock the special things you need to make really cool courses for you and your friends to try to beat!

“When you make a course that you really like or are really proud of you can write down the code for it that you can give to your friends. You can also make up codes just to see what will happen when you put them into your game. I made up some really good codes but my favorite course is the one I call slip, slide, and run.

“For the game for the Nintendo 3DS you can’t play your friends in multi-player, like you can in the version for Xbox 360 that I have, but on the other hand the version for 3DS you can take with you anywhere you like and I do so I can play the game when we are in the car and on the train.

“The announcers in the game are funny but they are not as funny as they think they are.

“I played the game a lot and even though you can’t play the game multi-player on the 3DS it is still a lot of fun and you can spend lots of time making your own courses which is also fun, so I gave it 9 points out of 10 and if it had multi-player it would have been 10 points for sure.”

Our Lab Rat reckoned that the game earned the 9 out of 10 points that he awarded it, and feels that the game has a very high replay score.

While stating that the total play time for a single play-through of the game was just 4 hours, our Lab Rat estimated that the potential game play time for the 3DS version of Wipeout: Create and Crash numbers in the hundreds of hours, but stressed that the actual amount of play time would depend on the individual player and how much they like the game.

Put on your game face, make some game noise, because this is going to get messy!

My Take

It is often the case, when a game has been assigned to a Lab Rat for review, that our focus for the “My Take” tends to focus more upon technical and functional impressions than it does game play impressions. This is permitted thanks to the fact that our Lab Rats nicely cover game play feel and mechanics, and their overall rating for the game.

This leaves us free to explore issues like the typical game play time, necessary for computing the Average Admission Price, which we shall complete now…

Game play in Wipeout: Create and Crash is typical for the average handheld portable game particularly with respect to length of play, which in the case of WCC runs right around a comfortable five to six sitting hours, which is short enough so that the game could be played in one sitting — though it is clearly not meant to be consumed in that fashion.

Fortunately despite this one-big-gulp of potential game play, WCC was in fact engineered to permit a large number of tiny nibbles — which is to say that the player can choose to play the game by dividing game play up into easy to swallow nibbles made up of each course challenge rather than by level.

This complicates the process by which the average game play time is factored for the purposes of reaching the Average Admission Price, because to do so one must first work out the replay value, and the amount of content that is available via replay, before forming some sort of estimate on how attractive obtaining said content is in order to place a value on replay and the number of replays that are more or less required.

The question is, how much better a course can you design than those that were created by the developers for the game?

Fortunately for WCC the game ends up having a higher-than-average replay level — we say that this is fortunate for the game as otherwise if it were only good for a single play-through the game might have ended up with an unacceptable Average Admission Price — but the higher-than-average replay score pretty much guarantees that not to be the case.

Due to selection of characters and a wider selection of special items and kit that the player will unlock via the primary play as well as each subsequent play, the associated values are sensibly increased.

Another factor included is the grading system for play, and the likelihood that, even with the best efforts of the player, consistently obtaining the top-level (Bronze, Silver and Gold Trophies) is unlikely, which means that the player will likely be replaying many of the levels in order to top-up their score.

Unlocking all of the options for course creation takes time, effort, and money, and as the Course Creator also happens to be one of the modes for the game that players will spend a lot of time and effort in, so it is fair to describe it as something of a time sink. All of which naturally adds to the play time overall.

Finally we can factor in the newest mode for series play — the “Wipeout Max” — which has the player completing what often feels like an endless endurance surge of randomly generated levels, and we find yet another element increasing the overall play time.

When they are done with this course prop, our dog has dibs on it....

So. taking all of this into consideration we end up with a very good replay value, and using the conservative system that we use for determining the average play time, we arrive at a defensible average play time (taking into account replays in this instance) of around 70 hours before the game has really used up its measure of attraction.

That is not to say that one may not end up returning to play it after a reasonable absence and still find it to be entertaining, but based upon that conservative play time estimate, we arrive at an Average Admission Price of just .42 cents an hour.

Before we reveal the rating score that the game has earned it should be underscored that it receved a higher-than-average replay score from us.

Acknowledging that we only gave the game a single play-through start-to-finish, the score that it earned was significantly affected by the mixture of minor technical bugs and the odd and frequent character behavior, combined with its rather odd interpretation of physics (we assure the developers that in spite of their take on the matter, the laws of physics are not actually flexible) Wipeout: Create and Crash earns a solid (for it) score of 7 out of 10.

In its favor we point out that in spite of the eye-popping oddities in terms of physics and the graphical manifestation of what seems to be unanticipated actions and reactions, this game is very fun to play, offers some interesting and challenging course designs, features a very attractive collection of unlockable collection and functional items, and its intuitive Course Creator, that 7 out of 10 in no way changes the facts: this is a fun game that is worth playing.

Parents: Wipeout: Create and Crash is properly rated by the ESRB as E10+ (E for Everyone, Aged 10 and Older). The game contains no objectionable content, and the only language of concern are some comments by the announcers referencing alcoholic beverages. While the game includes fairly violent results in some of the more colorful wipeouts, this is a sort of violence that is the result of the actions of the player and not violence between characters, which means that its contents offer age-appropriate game play.

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A review copy of this game for Nintendo 3DS was provided by Activision

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Blog Author

Chris Boots-Faubert

Game On is written by Cape Cod Times Columnist CM Boots-Faubert, who started gaming in 1972 on Pong, quickly moving on to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision when they were released. His current gaming systems include the Xbox360, PS3, Wii, NDS, and ... Read Full